Paralegals and the opportunities of AI

The legal profession stands at a pivotal moment, with generative AI poised to transform the landscape of legal work fundamentally. Law firms and legal professionals are encouraged to embrace this shift, not as a distant future, but as an unfolding reality that demands engagement, exploration, and adaptation. The greatest impact will be speeding up response times across the industry (especially where summarising large swathes of information), full adoption of dynamic contract management and automation capable of updating business intelligence and responding to changing risk factors.

According to Gartner, by 2025, 30% of enterprises will implement AI-augmented strategies. This suggests a move toward more sophisticated legal analytics and predictive modelling, enhancing precision in case outcome predictions and legal risk assessments. By 2026, the integration of AI colleagues into work processes will facilitate a collaborative model where AI assists in legal research, case preparation, and even mundane administrative tasks, enabling lawyers to focus on higher-value activities. By 2027, the emergence of applications automatically generated by AI without human involvement will revolutionise legal software development, making custom solutions more accessible and affordable for law firms of all sizes.

For Paralegals, the deployment of AI tools, will likely lead to work involving more nuanced business-led advice rather than collation and administration of data, plus there will be a focus on quality control and the optimisation and safeguarding of contractual arrangements. There’s also an opening for Paralegals to up-skill and become expert legal “prompt writers” (used for effective training and deployment of legal AI).

Prompt engineering is more than just a trend, it is a fundamental shift which is reshaping the way legal professionals interact with technology to enhance their work. Criticality, in law the stakes are high: a poorly constructed prompt could lead to misinterpretation or legal inaccuracy. Consider the example of an AI tool used for contract analysis. A well-designed prompt can help the tool not only identify key clauses and terms, but also understand their implications in different legal contexts. This capability transforms tasks such as contract review, due diligence and even legal research, saving countless hours while improving accuracy.

Legal prompt engineering is a multidisciplinary field that requires a deep understanding of both law and AI. Mastering the field requires not only familiarity with legal terminology and concepts, but also an understanding of how AI models process and respond to language. This dual expertise can be challenging, but it is essential to the development of effective legal AI tools – and there is certainly an opportunity for Paralegals here.

Should we be worried?

In most systems already in use which employ AI, the technology acts to support and improve the work of humans. Where firms are using such tech, there are signs that increasinglyfamiliarity is not only helping them to use it effectively, but it is also overcoming any concern thatthe use of AI could in some way replace humans. Most surveyed workers say that AI has improved both their performance and their working conditions.

A human (Paralegal) interface with AI will be essential for the foreseeable future particularly in areas such as identifying AI “hallucination” of detail in responses and verifying outputs generated. For example, Chat GPT can be prone to “hallucinations” or inaccuracies. In one example ChatGPT falsely accused an American law professor of sexual harassment and cited a non-existent Washington Post report in the process. Chatbots are trained on a vast trove of data taken from the Internet, although the sources are not available in many cases. Operating like a predictive text tool, they build a model to predict the likeliest word or sentence to come after a user’s prompt. This means factual errors are possible, but the human-seeming response can sometimes convince users that the answer is correct.

Paralegals could verify the identity of clients, catch fraudulent transactions and AI voiced phishing scams, and help identify where legal liability lies in the AI value chain: providers (creators) or deployers (users). AI cannot make these distinctions itself, Paralegals can.

Preparing for an AI future

So, how can Paralegals prepare for a future with AI, what do they need to consider today to be ready for tomorrow?

I believe, Paralegals should focus on targeted applications of AI rather than novelty factors. Developing their understanding of how automation can benefit a firm or in-house team will put them in a great position to the lead the AI transition. It’s worth remembering that, very often, it is the Paralegals who have the best insight into the day-to-day processes required to keep a practice running effectively.

Paralegals are also well positioned to explore the opportunities that AI brings and therefore act as a vanguard of AI experts who understand where AI adoption will bring the most benefit, while also having an understanding of the limitations and pit falls of the technology.